Fitting quote (from the bible): "Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the middle of wolves: be you therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves."

Eyestorm is a game Michael and I began working on back in November. A game on the iPhone app store is likely to vanish into oblivion unless it is special, and even then it might not survive for long. Eyestorm is special to me because it is one of those rare projects were I have felt more than 90% satisfied with the end-result.

So much energy has gone into graphics, sound, music, code, level design etc., that submitting Eyestorm to Apple actually made me feel really really nervous; For how will this little baby of ours which has now grown up survive in the dangerous realm of the iTunes store.

Eyestorm was Michael's idea originally. He wanted a Jezzball/Styx clone for the iPhone. We found one (I forgot the name) and we immediately found it too ugly, too hard, and just plain boring. So knowing that there was something he wanted that did not exist Michael started working. He made several prototypes. Some of them looked a lot like the clones that are on the store now. Some were quite sophisticated. Eventually, we settled on the ball/brick strategy used in the final game.

Here is a bit of trivia:

• Started development in November 2008. Was developed in parallel with a bunch of other projects. Estimated full-time development: 6-7 man-weeks
• Initially used plain Quartz. Moved to Core animation. When that didn't run smoothly enough we moved to OpenGL. That was the only way to get 40+ fps.
• Code-name: Fireball. This was my idea. Michael called it O-fence. Originally I wanted to make a game with burning balls. We did not settle on Eyestorm until 2 weeks before submission. Until then we did not have a proper name
• It was Michael's idea to use CGTextures. We couldn't have made the game without them
• The eye-idea came in December 2008. Until then we just used balls. Michael and I never agreed on the background story (I wanted the game to start in prison). The problem was to create a suitable animating object.
• Several people asked if I could put eyelids on the eyes. For a while I thought I could
• To create the eyes, I built a custom ray-tracer one very late evening using some ingredients I had for a real-time ray-tracer built for CUDA
• The sea-monsters were there almost from the beginning
• The enemy source-code is a first-class example of object oriented programming
• The gfx, code, and first level for the UFOs were done in one single evening including the required extensions to our custom ray-tracer.
• The first time I loaded up the UFO after doing the code, animation, laser beams, and sound it worked instantly and Michael and I were laughing for minutes over its aggressiveness. This was probably the funniest moment during development. It was love at first sight. The UFO-code was only changed very little after that
• Music was a challenge. Even though we know most people are likely to use the iPod music player, we felt we needed some sort of background music. We both loaded up Garage Band several times. In the end I made a couple of tracks that we found acceptable for the game. Now I can't really see the game without them -- much less play it.
• The light effects on levels Courtyard, Subway, and Lighthouse were Michael's idea. It actually took me a full day to make them which I think is a lot for such a small detail.
• The game was 17 MB uncompressed one week before submission. I cut away 6 MB music and graphics including several musical tracks to get it to 10.6 MB uncompressed (9.8 compressed).
• The cross-hair was a late addition to the game. I added it because I saw my girlfriend and mother struggling with the game. Having my mother play the game was a good usability test. The cross-hair completely changed the feeling of the game
• Special thanks to my girlfriend who patiently played this game many many times.
• The green UFO level was added 1 1/2 weeks before submission as the last level. It was added solely to introduce UFOs at an earlier stage in the game. Before that they did not appear until the UFOes level
• Most levels took between one and two hours to make once I had an overall idea/theme
• The monorail level took 1+ full day to make due to the eye-movement which was very painful to implement
• The screen-wipe effects were inspired by the original DOOM and 5 of the moon-base levels share names with shareware DOOM levels. DOOM was one of the last games I played and I needed names of moon-base levels. Interestingly enough my girlfriend told me that the level Prison Sewers reminded her of DOOM -- That was unintentional
• The Dr. Eyequeue level was inspired by the ending of Lord of the Rings films. However, it was too complicated to make a crashing tower with the big eye dropping to the ground so I settled for an explosion instead
• Was finished almost a complete week before submission so that we had adequate time to test and remove critical bugs. On submission day we ended up making quite a few last-minute changes anyway.
• While taking screen-shots I got so immersed in the game several times, that I completely forgot why I was playing it
• Began development without deadline. I originally wanted to release it in December, but the game wasn't even close to finish even by January. This game was a classic "it will be done when it is done"-game. Originally we also only wanted 24 levels. I think the final product greatly exceeds my own expectations